fice one day listening to the most
effeminate man I’ve ever encoun-
tered, a general’s secretary, jab-
bering on in such a way that the
general had to know what he was
dealing with. Perhaps he didn’t. At
any rate, like the Purloined Letter,
we were hidden in plain sight.
Even now that DADT has
been repealed, I suspect that being
out in the Army still depends on
the people one is working with.
There is a real sting to Mattilda
Bernstein Sycamore in a piece in
The New York Times
mocking the
idea that “openly gay soldiers pressing buttons in Nevada to
obliterate Somali villages means homophobia is on the wane.”
There are multiple ironies here. But as AfricanAmericans knew,
there’s no better way to cement one’s position in a culture than
to be willing to kill for it. In wanting not to be marginalized,
the gay movement has tried to assure heterosexuals that they
are human beings just like them: they want to marry, serve in the
Army, and have kids. But still: who would ever have predicted
that gay liberation would become inextricably entangled with
the urge to enlist? One could even argue that the Army is dis-
criminatory now not because of sexual orientation but because
the draft has been abolished. The way it works now, the major-
ity of Americans experience nothing when we send troops to
Iraq or Afghanistan; we’re paying
surrogates, the way men did in the
Civil War, to do the awful work of
killing for us. It’s another case of
gay assimilation leaving every-
thing as it was. What is the an-
swer to Martin Duberman’s
question: Why would gays
want
to serve in the military? Many of
us did everything we could to
avoid it.
So, not long ago when I saw
the photograph of the former
Bradley, now Chelsea, Manning
in her blond wig looking out at us
through the window of a car taking her to prison—the ability of
the Army to whisk one away!—my first reaction was that here
was just another of the gay clerks who, in my experience, ran
the Army. At the same time, the photograph was beyond any-
thing a drag queen could have staged—it was
Myra Brecken-
ridge
. Chelsea (whose father was, like Edward Snowden’s, a
military man) was the nightmare of the heterosexual patriarchy:
a homosexual betraying secrets
and
dissolving the boundary be-
tween male and female.
What was going on? The answer to Martin Duberman’s
question undoubtedly has something to do with wanting full cit-
izenship—though Chelsea seems to have entered the Army for
the oldest reason in the book: her life was a mess—one of the
main reasons people have joined armies in every country, in
every century. But she went on, you could argue, to make it
more of a mess by revealing secrets—secrets that had nothing
to do with her sexuality. Or did they? One has to wonder, be-
cause the next person to be involved in the leaking of classified
information was also gay: an American journalist named Glenn
Greenwald living with his boyfriend in Brazil when he helped
Snowden expose the NSA to the media.
Of course, one can argue that revealing these kinds of se-
crets has nothing to do with sexual orientation. Snowden is
straight. Countless gay people have served in the U.S. Armed
Forces over the years—before, during, and after “Don’t ask,
don’t tell”—without ever doing what Manning and Greenwald
did. But one wonders how they will be perceived. Earlier this
year Greenwald told
The New York Times
: “When you grow up
gay, you are not part of the system, it forces you to evaluate: ‘Is
it me, or is the system bad?’” Which raises the question: do
Manning and Greenwald embody a post-assimilationist psy-
chology? Will gay people now choose targets of rebellion that
have nothing to do with gay rights? Is the rejection of secrecy
that fueled the repeal of DADT taking a new twist? It’s all about
secrets, when you think about it.
In 1966 one could refuse to check the box admitting homo-
sexual tendencies because one did not want to be outed and
marked “D
AMAGED
G
OODS
.” There were, of course, gay men
who
did
check the box, who were, you could say, brought out
of the closet by the War in Vietnam. (Foreign wars have so
many unforeseen domestic consequences.) Now that “Don’t
ask, don’t tell” is history, one no longer has to hide one’s sex-
ual orientation. But this time Manning and Greenwald were re-
belling against another kind of secrecy.
30
The Gay & lesbian review
/
worldwide
Bradley / Chelsea Manning
The sequel to
Blessed
and Betrayed, by
Dennis Paul Stradford,
Betrayed and
Redeemed
continues
the saga of how the
training of Catholic
priests leads inevitably
to stark choices for
closeted gay men, and
the consequences as
their lives are cor-
rupted by lies, secrets
and obsessions.
“Reading chapters of this book is like getting the detail
behind the headlines about the Vatican ... sex, coercion,
blackmail, financial scandal and how they are all so re-
alistically connected are a part of this book … Find out for
yourself what might really go on behind the walls of the
Vatican.”
— Amazon reviewer
